For Mike More, local government is in a state of "continuous revolution". "Although it's a cliche, change is normal," says the chief executive of Westminster city council, one of three public leaders at the pinnacle of London's great tri-borough testbed.

While those around him doubt the sustainability of councils, heralding the end of local government as we know it in a death by a thousand cuts, More remains upbeat. "I don't see us stabilising, I see us continuing to change. It's not the death of local government; I see it as a revolution."

The creation of the tri-borough agreement – essentially a large shared service model with neighbouring boroughs Hammersmith and Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea – was itself an innovation aimed at coping with the changes facing local government. "We didn't want to go down the route of cut, cut, cut. We wanted to go back and rethink the way we did business," More says.

Two years in, the model has enabled these three councils – geographically and, more crucially, politically aligned – to co-ordinate children's services, adult social care and library services and save money in the process. Although the arrangement has been praised for finding efficiencies in tough times, and the "mutual learning" fostered between the authorities, it has not been without its challenges.

"Our political leaders had to persuade their communities that we weren't creating a remote bureaucracy that was bigger and more distant. Added to that were the classic issues, similar to that of a merger, of who is winning and who is losing. Is one culture going to prevail? I would be lying if I said that these issues weren't still continuing to be at play."

The big issue for the tri-borough partnership is maintaining the quality of public services. Yet More says the restructure has actively improved the lives of local people. "We can improve lives because we can make our services more resilient. We are able to protect that which would be ravaged by arbitrary cuts. It is a counterfactual negative: we are stopping it getting a lot worse."

With welfare reform on the horizon and the three boroughs working together to cope with a fundamental shift in what local authorities can do, Westminster is also banking on a change in the relationship between local authority and citizen. More admits this could be tricky.

"We are living through a pretty difficult period; the welfare benefit debate is a good example of that," he says. "The scale of changes that services are going through at present, and the length of the austerity measures that are taking place, are going to put a lot of pressure on citizenship, organisations, and people. I don't yet say we have a new age of citizens but it is a work in progress.

"You have to develop a mechanism whereby the families themselves are supported in taking responsibility. You support them, but you also challenge them. In this example, people taking responsibility for themselves is the only solution, because if they don't you are wasting money and not solving a problem. The empirical evidence says that if an individual has control over their own lives they are more likely to be happier and fulfilled."

So if we're not facing the end of local government, how about a new kind of local authority? More talks of a new philopsophy for councils to make sense of themselves amid a period of great change. He wants services to be understood, and designed, locally and individually.

"We need to have a much more can-do, positive, self-confident outlook if there is to be a renaissance in local public services. Every experience someone has of public services is an experience in a place, by an individual, at a particular time. It is by definition always local. We have to promote that concept in our thinking."

Talk of philosophy and the concept of what local government will be tomorrow is no surprise from More, who believes the job of chief executive is a creative role.

"Local authorities are often thought of as a backwater which I've never understood. I've always thought of it as one of those MasterChef type programs. We are the cooks in the kitchen bringing all the ingredients together," he says. "That, I think, is endlessly fascinating."